NASA Satellite Imagery Reveals the Shrinking Aral Sea in Central Asia

A new series of images released by NASA shows the dramatic shrinking of the Aral Sea, located in Central Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Once the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea began growing smaller in the 1960s after its tributaries were diverted by the Soviet Union to turn nearby deserts into farmlands. These images, captured by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the Terra satellite, reveal that the lake’s current size is a fraction of what it used to be.

According to text accompanying the photos, in 2005 Kazakhstan constructed a dam between the northern and southern sections of the lake. While the dam completely dried up the southern portion of the Aral Sea, which was deemed impossible to save, water levels in the north have slightly rebounded since. Credit: Rebecca Lindsey for NASA Earth Observatory